How much longer will we trust Google’s search results? • Hacker News Board

Re: How much longer will we trust Google’s search results?

#211

Post by fiatjaf » Sat, Jan 25, 2020, 12:18 AM UTC

BitwiseFool wrote: post #4

I've actually moved to other search engines because the quality of the results have gone down dramatically. It seems like google will fixate on one or two keywords in my search (usually the most generic ones) and ignore the rest. In addition, the old google tricks like using quotes for literal values no longer seems to work. It is like google is guessing what I want, rather than trying to find what I have entered as…

This.

Please search engine, listen to this: it's ok if you don't have any results for what I'm searching. I want to know fast when there are no results, so I can try other queries. I don't want to open a dozen of pages before realizing you didn't had any results so only gave me garbage.

Re: How much longer will we trust Google’s search results?

#212

Post by Tagbert » Sat, Jan 25, 2020, 12:35 AM UTC

their quality has definitely gone down and they are really pushing their own results for domains like travel. They seem to have mixed goals there or maybe not.

Re: How much longer will we trust Google’s search results?

#213

Post by black_yarn » Sat, Jan 25, 2020, 12:39 AM UTC

geddy wrote: post #163

They've been terrible for years. I yearn for the days when you'd look up "x video game review" and you'd get actual human beings with personal sites showing up, and opinions from random people. Now that SEO has been beaten into a pulp, the first 8,000 pages are either major corporations or spam. So the modern internet in general, I suppose. Corporations in spam. Never mind, it'd be unreasonable of me to expect anythi…

Wish I could up this a thousand times. I've had a personal site for some twenty years; nothing fancy, but I put a lot of effort into my content, and I used to get hundreds of unique visitors a day.

Over the last ten years, my non-bot traffic has dropped to a tenth of that, and at the same time, my ability to find similar websites has disappeared. Now I see nothing but resume-padding blogs with generic WordPress templates, and pages of empty corporate bullshit.

Re: How much longer will we trust Google’s search results?

#214

Post by clairity » Sat, Jan 25, 2020, 12:46 AM UTC

bilbo0s wrote: post #210

clairity wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

it's really not hard to define what a "good" ad might be--a product (or service) you don't know about but that solves an immediate problem without an immediately obvious solution. it'd anticipate your need, without invading your privacy. fwiw, i generally don't want to be subjected to ads either, particularly for the privacy-invading aspect, but also the time- and attention-wasting aspect too. most ads are absolutely…

You gave examples of what I assume you consider "bad" ads. What would be examples of "good" ads in your opinion? I mean, examples matching the definition you gave: Anticipating needs of person X, (and serve person X an ad), without any foreknowledge of person X.

another poster gave a good example--offering related merchandise on a interest-based website/forum.

a made-up example might be a customer at best buy spending time in both the tv and pc departments and then having an ad pop up on a nearby screen for an intel NUC and/or apple tv (making the assumption you want a tv-connected computer). the ad didn't need to know any personal characteristics about you other than limited, directly observable behavior in the store.

i'm sure people who focus on this every day (i.e., not me) can provide better examples.

Re: How much longer will we trust Google’s search results?

#215

Post by reeddavid » Sat, Jan 25, 2020, 12:49 AM UTC

jborichevskiy wrote: post #13

> Recode’s Peter Kafka recently interviewed Buzzfeed CEO Jonah Peretti, and Peretti said something really insightful: what if Google’s ads really aren’t that good? What if Google is just taking credit for clicks on ads just because people would have been searching for that stuff anyway? I’ve been thinking about it all day: what if Google ads actually aren’t that effective and the only reason they make so much is bill…

I frequently see people click through a Google Ad just because they didn't type in the whole domain name. Example: type "NYtimes" into address bar, click on top-most link (an ad). In these cases, the ads are entirely extractive compared to organic results.

Re: How much longer will we trust Google’s search results?

#216

Post by hysan » Sat, Jan 25, 2020, 1:37 AM UTC

jborichevskiy wrote: post #13

> Recode’s Peter Kafka recently interviewed Buzzfeed CEO Jonah Peretti, and Peretti said something really insightful: what if Google’s ads really aren’t that good? What if Google is just taking credit for clicks on ads just because people would have been searching for that stuff anyway? I’ve been thinking about it all day: what if Google ads actually aren’t that effective and the only reason they make so much is bill…

One way to read this is “Google is serving up ads for what would have been the top search result anyway.” This makes you then wonder, why pay for ads?

Because if you don’t, a competitor will and that is where the article takes the turn into talking about the new layout, occlusion, etc. It’s an interesting discussion about trust and how far Google can push before that trust is broken. However, I’m almost certain I’ve had this conversation a decade ago.

Re: How much longer will we trust Google’s search results?

#217

Post by SquishyPanda23 » Sat, Jan 25, 2020, 1:41 AM UTC

listenallyall wrote: post #209

grawprog wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>quality ads I've seen this term for years but I still don't understand what it means. I don't want to see ads. There are no 'quality' ads. All ads are designed to sell me things period. I don't need anyone telling me about what I might want. I understand ads exist to make money and if they didn't we wouldn't have the internet etc. But there's no 'quality' to them, they're a necessary evil i've come to accept and ada…

Your hard-line position that all ads are bad, always, is laughable. If you search for "cheapest gasoline" it's not unreasonable that an ad for an electric car might be interesting. Or if you search for "Orlando hotels", an ad for generally less expensive hotels in Kissimmee (the next town over) is more valuable than a perfectly literal result. And if you search for "k8s cluster deployment tools" then you probably wan…

> Your hard-line position that all ads are bad, always, is laughable.

This doesn't seem especially civil.

> If you search for "cheapest gasoline" it's not unreasonable that an ad for an electric car might be interesting.

Interesting to whom? The parent comment doesn't want to see ads. So no it's not likely to be interesting in this context.

> Or if you search for "Orlando hotels", an ad for generally less expensive hotels in Kissimmee (the next town over) is more valuable than a perfectly literal result.

For me, personally, no I would find that to be an annoyance.

> And if you search for "k8s cluster deployment tools" then you probably want as many ads as possible, so your evaluation doesn't fail to include a comprehensive set of options.

Again no, I would want 0 ads in that case. Have you read about k8s cluster deployment tools? It's hard to find any useful information because even the results that aren't literally ads are fluff blog posts with little content. I don't want the fluff posts, but I can comb through them. I certainly don't want the ads.

> Perhaps you're saying I already know about electric cars and Kissimmee and kubernetes, to which I'd respond, yes, probably via ads.

There are ways to learn about things without someone paying for the right to say them at you when you don't want them to.

Re: How much longer will we trust Google’s search results?

#218

Post by stebann » Sat, Jan 25, 2020, 1:42 AM UTC

The beginning of the great fall...

Re: How much longer will we trust Google’s search results?

#219

Post by caymanjim » Sat, Jan 25, 2020, 1:42 AM UTC

gtirloni wrote: post #80

caymanjim wrote: post #29

I've seen various stories about this for a week, and I kept wondering when they were going to roll the change out so that I could see. It turns out that I just don't see any of the ads/sponsored links at all normally, presumably because uBlock is hiding them. I guess I'm surprised that enough HN users would even notice this.

The search results were changed to add a favicon and hide the URL. Adblockers wouldn't help with that.

Of course they can. Ad blockers like uBlock remove DOM elements.

Re: How much longer will we trust Google’s search results?

#220

Post by wayoutthere » Sat, Jan 25, 2020, 1:59 AM UTC

moultano wrote: post #208

JohnFen wrote: post #2

I don't trust Google's search results right now. Not because they've blurred the line between ads and results (although that certainly makes the situation much worse), but because I don't tend to get very good results from Google search.

Note that they just reverted the part of the change that was perceived to blur the lines between ads and results.

This has been building for years though. The tipping point in my mind was some time in early 2019 -- DuckDuckGo simply started returning more relevant results with fewer scrolls.